Thesis Title:Causes, Magnitude and Implications of Griefing in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

Hello,

My name is Leigh Achterbosch and I am a candidate for PhD at the University of Ballarat, Australia. I am inviting you to participate in a study about the act of griefing and its implications in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). This is one of many invitations posted on various MMORPG and online game forums.

This research will explore the following questions; what are the causes and implications of griefing in MMORPGs, and what magnitude of griefing exists in this genre? The intention is to contribute new research and knowledge about griefing and its sociological impact.

The study will involve an online survey for participants of the ages 16 and above. This survey will cover your experiences as someone that has performed griefing, been subjected to griefing, or as a witness to the acts of griefing.

You are invited to participate by following the link <removed> and completing the questionnaire that will take approximately 20 minutes of your time (You can save and reload unfinished surveys should you require). You will remain anonymous by completing this survey. The online survey will remain open until an appropriate sample size is collected. I will repost here when the survey has closed. At some point in the future when data has been collated and analyzed I will repost with some preliminary results in this forum thread.

I would like to thank you up front for any time you allocate towards this research endeavor. Feel free to spread this survey link around!

EDIT: This survey is closed, thank you.

Last edited by thelute; August 17th, 2012 at 05:18.
Reason: Survey Closed

Good survey! I think it might have been better to divide the first question in part 3 up into "never, rarely, occasionally, often, always". "Never" and "always" mean I can't think of ANY exceptions!

I remember "spamming" in a game called Orb Wars. This was WAAAAYYY back in the late 80's, long before "spam" meant anything other than canned meat. They set the game up so you could issue commands with macros. I set one up to keep sending tells with looong messages in them. Being as how we were down at 1200 baud at the time, that turned out to be a debilitating attack! I only used it once and I asked my opponent before the match if I could try it out. After we found out how well it worked, we both went to the developer with it and they quickly cut the max size of a macro way down. Since I got permission I wouldn't count it as griefing but still, it means I was spamming back before most spammers got out of diapers!

Kind of harassment. Generally trying to disrupt and destroy people's fun. Out of purpose, out of boredom, sometimes.

— “ Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.“ (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

While I experienced some Griefing over my many, many years of gaming, since maybe the last two years I only play World of Warcraft from time to time and only on Servers with PvE-Mechanics, where Griefing is reduced to a minimum because of the limited possibilities to do so. The Game gets more and more boring year after year though - but in my limited Sparetime I just don't want to expose myself to griefing anymore.

— The Germans are a cruel race. Their operas last for six hours and they have no word for "fluffy".

I've both been the victim of griefing, and in deathmatch games been a griefer myself from time to time.

I've never griefed an MMO before, i think people that do that are just sociopaths. FPS deathmatches are different for some reason - i dont know. It's the all-out chaos of the thing, there's death everywhere, it's complete anarchy and nihilism anyway, and it just feels pretty good sometimes to sit perched on top of something and rain grenades or snipe into a hard-pressed battle below….

— I dont dislike people - I just like them better when theyre not around